Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday July 02, 2012 @10:00AM
from the money-fixes-everything dept.

tekgoblin writes "Today a Chinese court has stated Apple, Inc. has agreed to pay a Chinese company $60 Million dollars to settle their infamous iPad name dispute. In 2006 Apple purchased the Taiwanese rights to the name 'iPad' from the company Proview Electronics. In China however, the trademarked name was still owned by Proview Technologies, a Shenzhen based subsidiary of Proview Electronics. Since 2011, Proview Technologies has battled Apple in the Xicheng district court and in 2012 the Santa Clara Superior Court. Both cases are still ongoing."

According to Proview's creditors. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

No there isn't - there are only Apple's claims on one side, versus Proview's claims and this settlement on the other. Apple have never disclosed the text of the contract between their front "IP Application Devlopment" and Proview Electronics. The U.S. case was dismissed because the U.S. court decided it had no jurisdiction to rule on the contract. From all we know right now, Apple may have signed a contract that didn't include China rights, or that failed to specify exactly where the parent company did own the rights, and whether or not that included China. International multi-jurisdictional law is complicated, perhaps Apple's lawyers made a mistake. Or maybe they didn't. But either way, unless you know of someone who has actually seen the contract, then there is no real evidence here. Infer what you will from the fact that Apple settled.

From everything I've read, Proview actually signed the agreement then backed out when they found out it was Apple because they figured they could milk them for a lot more money. I guess, it being Chinese law, they were right.

According to Proview's creditors. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.

No there isn't - there are only Apple's claims on one side, versus Proview's claims and this settlement on the other.

You apparently missed the case in Hong Kong that preceded this one [theregister.co.uk]. Proview first attempted to sue Apple there back in 2010, and the judge came down extremely hard on Proview, ruling that they had engaged in exploitative behavior (I believe I also saw the word "conspiracy" being used in some other reports at the time). The person at the head of both Proview branches is the same person, so he had full knowledge of the business dealings, and the Hong Kong judge, who we have every reason to believe was privy to the details of the contract, ruled that Proview had indeed sold Apple the worldwide rights to the trademark, both for the Taiwanese branch and the PRC subsidiary. Proview only sued Apple in the PRC after that previous case failed and they declared bankruptcy.

What you should infer from this settlement is that Apple didn't want to take chances with their multi-billion USD business in a court system that may play favorites with a local company.

I know a hot topic gets multiple selections, so do Slashdot editors pick the one with the single worst article? This news items is covered [pcmag.com] in [cnet.com] several [wsj.com] reputable [arstechnica.com] places [huffingtonpost.com], yet, they selected a submission that looks like it was written by an 8th grader. They use AP's Tweet to make it look like an official AP story/headline. There's brilliantly nonsensical lines like "Proview is continuing their lawsuit in Santa Clara for $1.5 billion dollars while allging fraud and unfair competition. The case was soon after thrown out by a judge."

They bought what they thought were the world-wide rights to the trademark. What Apple did that you really should be bitching about is they created a dummy corp and lied to Proview about what the trademark was for. "Oh well we're just a piddly lil company that needs that acronymn, it's hardly worth anything but if you'd like to part with it..."